Spore Post #3 – Tribal Stage

If you can’t tell from the title, this is the third post in my Spore series, and probably the one I’ve been least looking forward to. This post is *cough* dedicated to…

~~Tribal Stage~~

Dun dun dunn…

After your creature’s brain gets big enough, he’ll wander back to his nest and pick up a stick. After bashing it around a bit, he’ll create fire and turn his lovely little stick into a big shaman staff. Now you have to look after not one, but three creatures. Your first goal is to collect food. Food is treated as a currency in Tribal stage. There are many options of getting food:

Meat – Kill a creature and have one of your villagers collect the meat. The amount of meat depends on the size of the creature. If you kill an epic you’ll have food for days, while if you kill a pest you get barely enough to fill the plate.Fruit – You can pick this off bushes, same as in creature stage.Eggs – You can steal these out of creature’s nests, or if you tame a creature you can harvest them from a box in it’s pen.Fish – Certain areas of water have lots of fish. You can tell your villagers to go fishing there. If you over-fish an area, you’ll have to find somewhere else. Fishing spots are displayed on your mini map.Seaweed – Only herbivores eat this. They catch it instead of fish. It’s treated the same as fish, so if you pick too much of it the fish (and the seaweed) goes away, and you’ll have to find a new spot.

There are lots of thing you can do with food. You can “buy” new tribal members with it, build huts for housing tools (more on those later) and bribe other tribes into liking you. Nothing says ‘Howdy, neighbor!’ like a big basket of seaweed!

Your main goal in tribal stage is to become the supreme tribe. There are two options for getting rid of other tribes:

1. The obvious way.
2. Make them your ally.

If you like making friends better than ripping heads off unsuspecting cave-creatures, then you need to appeal to the tribe in question’s tastes. The most forward way of making friends is to play music for them. All tribes have one type of instrument at the start, and you unlock more along the path to transcendence. But as I said above, you have to do what that tribe likes. Members of the tribe will yell out which instrument they want your band to play in the form of little emoticons. Oblige to their requests and your little friend meter will soar upwards. At the end of the performance the other tribe gives you a rating out of ten, and your relationship improves accordingly. Just like in creature stage, you need a big green smiley face to become allies, after which your new friends will share with you the secret to their unique tools.

You can also give them gifts (a basket of food) to temporarily improve relations with that tribe. Gifts are a good idea when the tribe hates you and would likely attack your band on sight unless they were soften with bribes first. When you become allies with a tribe they will often send you gifts – but make sure someone is there to pick it up, because sometimes if no one takes the gift they take it back with them!

For those with more morbid tastes, you can take the bull by the horns and launch an all-out attack on the tribes village. Apparently that doesn’t sit too well with the locals, so be prepared for resistance. All tribes have a type of weapon readily available to them from the start, so if you have the food to spare you might as well equip your little soldiers with it – after all, anything’s better than your fists (unless you have maxed-out fighting abilities from creature stage, and even then it’d be a close battle). Also, if you have poison spit launchers, they can be pretty handy. All weapons have a super attack, which all selected tribe members with that weapon will use. Spears have a charge attack, but instead of stopping when they hit their target, they will continue running for a while, possibly injuring multiple targets. Flaming torches are used to stun the target for a few seconds. Stone axes are swung around in a circle, dealing large amount of damage to the opponent(s).

When attacking a village, don’t bother destroying the smaller tool shacks. Aim for the Main Hut. When the Main Hut is destroyed, the tribe falls into disarray, and ultimately dies off. Killing all the tribal members makes your job easier, because you can lose a fair amount of your own contingent if you let them pick you off while you’re working on the Hut. Note that the same thing can happen to you, so if you make an enemy, defeat them as fast as you can, or at least bribe them long enough for you to get your forces up.

When the Main Hut falls, the spoils of war are yours – their tools and (if you feel like it) their food supply. The tools are added automatically, but you need to get your tribal members to pick up the food and bring it back to your village. It might take a long time, especially if there’s a lot of distance between the two villages. Enemy villages seem to have the same idea, but normally they’re not bright enough to register that the village’s occupants are standing there looking at the them. If you can take them down fast, you can take your bundle of food back from the would-be thief and plonk it back on the pile. Don’t bother giving chase if you didn’t catch him though. It’s not a big loss.

Tools:Throwing Spear – The tribal version of Spit. Good for long distance attacks.
Stone Axe – The best weapon for close-combat with enemy tribal members and creatures.
Flaming Torch – Not a great melee weapon, but very effective against huts.
Wooden Horn – An instrument.
Maraca – An instrument.
Didgeridoo – An instrument.
Healing Rods – Heals creatures that are on the field – it’s a good idea to have one or two of them when you go into battle.
Fishing Spear – Helps catch fish faster.
Gathering Canes – Allows your tribal member to carry more food. Useful for looting a defeated tribe’s food supply, or taking meat off a dead epic.

Tools are very useful, but to access tools you need to build the specific hut. And to unlock most tools you need to conquer or befriend tribes who do have access to them. All together there are nine different tools, but there’s only enough room for 6 huts, so chose them wisely.

Even though your creature has evolved, don’t forget about the other ones. There are plenty of creatures out in the wild. If you have the food, you can domesticate a species and farm them for eggs. Lots of eggs. You can have up to three different species (one of each) in your tribe’s animal enclosure. If a raiding party attacks your hut, your pets will try to attack them. They will fight to the death, which might not be very long, but at least it distracts your attackers long enough for you to prepare for battle. If you had any ally creatures with you at the end of creature stage, they will automatically be domesticated, which can save you time at the start of the stage. For some reason they’re always much smaller than other creatures in tribal stage, even rogue ones.

Also watch out for UFOs. Normally just a minor annoyance, they abduct your domesticated animals and occasionally your villagers themselves. If your unlucky enough to have your chieftain abducted… your screwed. Normally your chieftain just respawns after a while, but not when the aliens get him. You’ll lose the use of your tribal stage super powers, you won’t be able to conduct bands and you’ll lose the ability to select all your tribal members with the click of a button. Now you know how enemy tribes feel when you kill their chieftain.

Another minor annoyance are pests. When there’s no adult tribe member in the village a pest will scuttle in and steal your food. It won’t stop eating till you get back. It’s not a big deal when you’re loaded with food, but at the start it’s a fairly big problem. Also, if you leave any babies unattended they get attacked and normally killed if someone doesn’t come to the rescue.

There are also epics in tribal stage. They’re fairly easy to kill, but it might be wiser to let them live unless you have a shortage of food or they’re attacking your village. Because occasionally epics destroy (or at least weaken) other tribes, helping you on your way to the top.

Based on your decisions in your creature’s past, you have a number of super powers at your disposal.

Cell:Herbivore: Refreshing Storm – Causes plants to grow more fruit (even if already picked) and drop it to the ground.
Omnivore: Flying Fish – Causes our old buddy the Sea Serpent to rise from the depths and scare all the fish out of the water – easy pickin’.
Carnivore: Traps – Lays out a big bowl of food for all the hungry woodland creatures. They all hop over, thinking this is their lucky day… and drop dead, the poison gas turning their brains to mush (but not effecting the rest of the meat 😛 ).

Creature:Social: Fireworks – Fireworks are very popular with rival tribes. It can increase relationships with neighbor tribes, and will stop raid parties in their tracks. A free and effective alternative to gifts.
Adaptable: Beastmaster – Momentarily adds creatures to your tribe. They will help you socialize or fight until the effect wares off.
Predator: Fire Bombs – Your chieftain spews out mini bombs in a circle around himself. Good for melee fighting, as it doesn’t damage your own tribal members or huts.

Every time you destroy or unite a tribe, you get a tribal totem piece (and sometimes improvements to your village). The totem pieces differ depending on the way you acquired them. When you get all the pieces it’s time to pack up your supplies and head to the next stage – Civilization.

Whew. Glad that’s done. And I got it finished earlier than I had hoped, too. If you call three whole months with no posts ‘early’.

Lol do u like militaristic (soz about spellin) economy guys or religous?legoless:I like them all equally, but I guess if I had to pick a favourite it’d be military. Economy is good too, slower than religion but in a different way. Buying the whole planet just seems… cool to me. Religious is way too slow, and since when does playing music take over a city? Military is the easiest because once you unlock planes and have enough money to buy a fleet of them you’ve as good as won. What’s your favourite?